Victoria Campbell

God’s Trinitarian Self-Revelation: The Image of God

Ever since Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:18), Christians have been aware of a relationship between these three persons. While it is generally accepted among

Christians that these three persons make up one Trinitarian God, it is also probably the most difficult Christian doctrine to comprehend. It is a stumbling block to monotheistic peoples, such as Jews and Muslims, and causes unease among many people, whether they’re believers or not, because even a rudimentary understanding of math makes it difficult to see how three things can add up to one.

In this paper a new model of the Trinity is proposed that is consistent with the teachings of the early church fathers, avoids the heresies of Docetism, Gnosticism, Arianism, and

Modalism, and is accessible to modern people. Moreover, it avoids both the criticism of tri- theism common to the Social Trinitarian model as well as the very individualistic interpretation of “person” prevalent in Western culture. It is a model of the Trinity which is based upon God’s personhood, the self-revealing nature of God, and the ancient Hebrew understanding of personality. It describes both God’s and humanity’s personhood as three interpenetrating, mutually interpreting layers of increasing self-revelation: SELF (Father), WORD (Son), and ACTION (Spirit). This model is built upon the Hebraic insights from first century anthropology based upon the work of Bruce Malina and Bernard de Géradon.